In fact the preparations of war are rapidly changing "the
genius of the Island." Thereupon Erasmus launches into more general
considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do not fight, save
rarely, and then with only those of other species, and, moreover, not,
like us, "with machines upon which we expend the ingenuity of devils."
In every war also it is the non-combatants who suffer most, the people
build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys them, the most
righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than good, and even
when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been settled by
arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts long after
the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself freely on the
crimes of fighters and fighting.
Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world of
the spirit and in no wise expressed the general feelings either of his
own time or ours. It is interesting to turn to a very ordinary, it may
be typical, Englishman who lived a century later, again in a period of
war and also of quite ordinary and but moderately glorious war. John
Rous, a Cambridge graduate of old Suffolk family, was in 1623 appointed
incumbent of Santon Downham, then called a town, though now it has
dwindled away almost to nothing. Here, or rather at Weeting or at
Brandon where he lived, Rous began two years later, on the accession of
Charles I, a private diary which was printed by the Camden Society sixty
years ago, and has probably remained unread ever since, unless, as in
the present case, by some person of antiquarian tastes interested in
this remote corner of East Anglia.
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